The LHC (Large Hadron Collider) is once again colder than deep space as it is prepared for experiments to resume in late November.

The LHC’s eight sectors have all been cooled to 1.9 kelvin (-271 C, or -456 F) using cryogenic lines containing liquid helium. This operating temperature is colder than conditions in deep space, which is estimated to be 2.7 K. Zero K is the lowest temperature possible. Continued…

IT IS midnight on 22 September 2012 and the skies above Manhattan are filled with a flickering curtain of colourful light. Few New Yorkers have seen the aurora this far south but their fascination is short-lived. Within a few seconds, electric bulbs dim and flicker, then become unusually bright for a fleeting moment. Then all the lights in the state go out. Within 90 seconds, the entire eastern half of the US is without power.

A year later and millions of Americans are dead and the nation’s infrastructure lies in tatters. The World Bank declares America a developing nation. Europe, Scandinavia, China and Japan are also struggling to recover from the same fateful event – a violent storm, 150 million kilometres away on the surface of the sun.

It sounds ridiculous. Surely the sun couldn’t create so profound a disaster on Earth. Yet an extraordinary report funded by NASA and issued by the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in January this year claims it could do just that.

Over the last few decades, western civilisations have busily sown the seeds of their own destruction. Our modern way of life, with its reliance on technology, has unwittingly exposed us to an extraordinary danger: plasma balls spewed from the surface of the sun could wipe out our power grids, with catastrophic consequences.

The most serious space weather event in history happened in 1859. It is known as the Carrington event, after the British amateur astronomer Richard Carrington, who was the first to note its cause: “two patches of intensely bright and white light” emanating from a large group of sunspots. The Carrington event comprised eight days of severe space weather.

In September of 1859, the entire Earth was engulfed in a gigantic cloud of seething gas, and a blood-red aurora erupted across the planet from the poles to the tropics. Around the world, telegraph systems crashed, machines burst into flames, and electric shocks rendered operators unconscious. Compasses and other sensitive instruments reeled as if struck by a massive magnetic fist. For the first time, people began to suspect that the Earth was not isolated from the rest of the universe. However, nobody knew what could have released such strange forces upon the Earth–nobody, that is, except the amateur English astronomer Richard Carrington.

Continue reading the New Scientist article here…

Aurorae are produced by the collision of charged particles from Earth’s magnetosphere, they originate from the Sun and arrive at Earth in solar winds.

Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity.

Brilliant video.

Just as day and night are caused by the spinning Earth, and the seasons by the Earth’s orbit around the Sun, so too did the ancients believe in a larger cycle that influenced the rise and fall of civilizations.

Fascinating stuff:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqAuEu9YU7U

And more about ancient civilisations with advanced knowledge here:
Ancient Astronomers

NASA recently announced that substantial changes are occurring on the surface of the Sun which could bring about the next long lasting cold era.

“When the surface movement slows down, sunspot counts drop significantly. And when we have sunspot counts lower than 50 it means only one thing – an intense cold climate, globally,” Casey said.
http://www.redicecreations.com/article.php?id=2659

http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=38121&sectionid=3510208

On a related note, there is an Interesting article here on global warming with loads of graphs. The Earth spends nearly all of its time colder than we are now. The Earth is normally several degrees colder, and every 100,000 years or so, it spikes up to a bit warmer than we are now for a few thousand years, then goes cold again. And in fact, science calls the current period an “interglacial”, a temporary gap in the long ice age.

Some characters and robots that I saw during my trip to Japan, got to love that piano playing Wabot!

ASIMO      WABOT     ANDROID PROJECTS     GUNDAM

m.

It’s one of the great unanswered questions of science. What gives matter its mass? By generating conditions present moments after the big bang, scientists hope to locate the elusive ‘God Particle’. “This is going to take us to the next layer of understanding”, enthuses Prof Geoff Taylor. The Hadron Collider at CERN, due to be switched on next year, will shoot beams of energy around a 27 km loop, smashing them into each other at the speed of light. It’s all in the hope of detecting the Higgs Boson, or ‘God’ particle, thought to give matter its mass. CERN scientists will also create mini black holes and search for dark matter. As Taylor states: “We are on the verge of discovering how our universe evolved from the first few fractions of a second.”

http://youtube.com/watch?v=0Fg16j5hbvY